Swinbrook, Oxfordshire

 

Shelved

About 13 years ago I did a post on this blog about some tombs in the churchyard at Swinbrook. a delightful village on the edge of the Cotswolds in Oxfordshire. I implied that I’d write another post about something inside the church, but I wasn’t very happy about my photographs of what I wanted to write about, so I put the post on hold…and then forgot my original intention. A few weeks back, I returned to Swinbrook, looked at the monuments to members of the Fettiplace (sometimes Fettisplace) family, and took some rather better, though far from perfect, photographs. The surprising tombs of this important landowning family deserve their long-awaited blog post. Here it is. 

They lie, says John Piper in his Shell Guide to Oxfordshire, ‘on slabs like proud sturgeon’. Most of us, though, look at the enormous monuments, which cover most of the north wall of the chancel, as sets of shelves, supported by columns and topped by canopies of an architectural magnificence that’s somewhat at odds with the humble surroundings. As I’ve remarked before, if there are relatively few English churches of the 16th and 17th centuries compared with the vasts numbers of medieval churches, architectural features on church monuments abound from the Tudor and Stuart periods, and these two grand memorials make use of the panoply of classical orders (Corinthian here), pediments (semicircular with heraldry) and other devices.

On the left as we look at the wall of the chancel, are the effigies of the earlier three generations of Fettiplaces: Sir Edmund (d.1613) at the top, then William (d.1562) and Alexander (d.1504). They look very similar and wear similar, but not identical, suits of armour. They are rather stiff and somewhat stylised figures and although they’re provided with stone cushions for the elbows on which they lean, this doesn’t seem to make them very comfortable. The architectural framework is impressive, but I remember that my instinct when I first saw them very m any years ago was to laugh. It was the combination of the shelves, the grand architecture, and the stiff but imposing figures that provoked this reaction I think. The sculptor is unknown, and authorities agonise over whether it was some local ‘primitive’ or the same craftsman who produced the Seymour monument at Berry Pomeroy in Devon, on which three figures recline in a very similar manner.

The second monument (above) is to another three male members of the same family, Sir Edmund (d.1686) and two Johns. The work here is more sophisticated. The faces are more individual, the bodies seem more naturally posed and more relaxed, and the stonework’s mix of pale and grey marble, together with gilding for the capitals and other details, is more confidently handled. This time, the work is signed, by William Byrd of Oxford. Byrd did many jobs for Oxford’s university and colleges, including the carving of the original emperors’ heads that surround the Sheldonian theatre, on which he would have worked with Sir Christopher Wren. No mere provincial he. The conjunction of these impressive sculptures with their less sophisticated neighbours made me smile this time rather than laugh, and itv was a smile of pleasure: I’m glad I returned.